Eye of the Beholder

Eye of the Beholder is a first person's view RPG, published in 1990.
The game was created by Westwood studios and published by Strategic Simulations, Inc.
It is a game that uses the second edition of Advanced Dungeons and Dragons rules.
Many things in this game, like: character creation, spells, classes etc follow the same set of rules other AD&D games follow.
See for an explanation of some of the basic AD&D rules: Dan Simpson's AD&D Rules FAQ

Eye of the Beholder was the first in a series of three games.
This first game is basically a huge dungeon of 12 levels.
Each level has many puzzles, enemies to fight etc.
But this game is mostly a "puzzle" RPG, where you have to solve many puzzles in order to make your way to the next level.
You will also meet NPCs on various levels, who will tell you part of the story, or ask you to help them.

Story:

Eye of the Beholder is a game set in the world of "The Forgotten Realms".
The game takes place in the city of Waterdeep.
Waterdeep is a city on The Sword Coast, north of Baldur's Gate and south of Neverwinter.
The city is ruled by Lords who ask you to investigate the sewers under Waterdeep.
There is an evil there, threatening the city and the name of Xanathar is mentioned often.
It is your task to find out what's wrong in Waterdeep, or rather: beneath it.
Once you've entered the sewers, they collapse behind you, making it impossible for you to get out again, that way.
Thus: finding a way out of those sewers becomes your "second" quest.

Character creation:

There are three ways to form your party:
The first is when you start the game when you can create characters.
You can either play the game with a premade party (The game comes with a saved game, you can simply load when you start the game for the first time) or create your own party.
In both cases: you start the game with 4 adventurers.
The second is that during the game certain NPCs will ask if they can join your party. You can, in this way, add two additional characters to your party, and you will then have a party of 6.
The third possibility is to pick up bones you'll find during the game. On some level, you'll meet a dwarf cleric who will offer to ressurect these bones and they'll turn into NPCs who also want to join you. This way you can add an additional character too (as far as I know, this can only happen once), but in the end you can only have 6 characters in your party.

When creating your own characters: remember that in this game only 2 characters can stand in the front row and use their weapons.
Characters in row two or three can't use weapons on enemies that stand before the party.
So: make sure you'll have two fighter type characters for your front row.
You'll also need a cleric and a mage.
Later you may add additional fighters, since you can always switch characters during combat. A back-up fighter often is useful: when one of your first-row fighters becomes too wounded, you can just put fighter number 3 in the front row instead.
You need a cleric in your starting party. I dont think you can even play the game without one.
Characters dont heal by themselves. In order to heal them, you'll need to rest the party and have the cleric cast heal spells on your party, during that rest.

If you chose to create your own party/ characters at the start of the game, you can create 4 characters.
At first you can chose the race of your character (chose from 6 races: human, half-elf, elf, dwarf, halfling or gnome) and their sexe.
Next you can pick their class from a list of 6: fighter, cleric, mage, paladin, thief or ranger. The race you chose also determines which classes you can pick, and with certain races you can also pick a combination class, like: fighter/mage etc.
Next choice is the alignment of your character (from lawful good to chaotic evil).
Then you get to pick their appearance (face) and finally you'll get to see the statistics of your character. If you want new one's, you can reroll the stats, until you like them. You can also "manually" change the stats of your character.
After you've picked 4 characters this way, you're ready to begin the game.

The game:

This game has puzzles in all sorts and shapes. At first, on the first levels these are easy puzzles (find a key, switch a lever), later on the puzzles become more and more difficult.
From riddles, to putting the right object in the right place, to find your way through labyrinths etc.
A lot of those puzzles come with cryptic remarks written on walls. 9 out of 10 times, the remarks should be taken very literally, in order to solve such a puzzle.
Other times, you'll find your way through a labyrinth of teleporters, or you'll need certain objects, to put in certain places/ holes etc.
There are certain puzzles that are rather difficult.

In the mean time you'll find enemies to fight. They go from easy to more harder enemies on the lower levels.
They also often come in groups. The fighting is "real-time". You can't pause the game during fighting, and you'll just have to figure out the right strategy during such fights.

There are lots of items you'll find too. Weapons, armor, potions and jewelry etc.
On top of that you'll need a lot of items to use portals on most levels, and to solve puzzles.
Once the enemies become harder, you'll also get more experience and gain levels faster.
Especially for your mage and cleric this is important, since you'll get better spells.

Through the whole dungeon there are so called "stone-portals".
Later on you'll find objects that you can "use" on those portals and that way you can portal-around the entire dungeon.
This is very useful, especially if you've forgotten to pick up an object, or when you get stuck in the game.
I once got stuck on level 9 and since a door closed behind me, I couldnt go back, until I found the right portal.

Magic:

Magic in Eye of the Beholder, follows the same rules as all other AD&D games.
There are two sorts of magic spells: mage's and priest's spells.
In this game you can either chose a cleric or a mage as magic user (and of course the combination classes, like: fighter/ cleric, fighter/ mage etc).
Both classes have 5 levels of spells. If you gain levels, you'll also be able to cast stronger spells.
In order to be able to cast a spell, you'll first have to memorize it (mage) or pray (cleric) for it.
That way the spell gets "readied" and then you will have to rest, for your spell to be ready to be cast.
Characters don't use mana in AD&D games, but instead: after each time you'll use a spell, you'll have to rest again before you can cast the spell again.
Mages will also have to write scrolls to their spellbooks, where priest spells, dont need to be scribed.
Finally: you'll find many mage's and priest's scrolls all through the dungeon.
Priest scrolls can't be scribed, but these scrolls can also be used to cast spells from.

Gameplay:

The gameplay of Eye of the Beholder is pretty simple: you can move by either using your keyboard, or by clicking arrows on your main screen with your mouse.
Your main screen is made up of the actual gamescene, pictures of your characters on the right part of the screen and movement arrows and a text box on the bottom of your screen.
In the bottom right part of your screen is a "camp" button. If you click this, a menu with certain options like: save/ load, memorize spells, pray for spells etc, will open.
Fighting happens by right clicking on your weapons (each character has two hand-slots beside it's portrait, which you can use to put your weapons in, or your spellbook, cleric symbol or potions etc).
Spell casting happens by right clicking your mages spellbook, or your cleric's holy-symbol.
After that a box will pop up where you can chose the right spell, and cast that spell, by left-clicking on it.
If you click on your character's portraits their inventory will open.

There is only one "slot" to save your game in.
Your saved game will appear as a file named "Eobdata.sav" in your gamefolder, and to have more possibilities to save your game, I simply copy that file to a floppy when I want to keep some saved games as back-up.

Even though this is an old DOS game, the game runs fine for me in Windows '98.
The graphics are of course outdated, but even now after all these years, this game is still very playable and the graphics don't look too bad.

Conclusion:

This game is old but still one of my favorite RPGs. It's full of puzzles, which is the kind of RPG I personally like best.

If you want to buy Eye of the Beholder, you can either go to Ebay at: Ebay.
The original games with all documentation are often offered for auction there and dont cost much.
Or you can try to get "The Forgotten Realms Archives Silver Edition", from Interplay.
This is an archive with 12 of the best AD&D games.
Some shops still sell this CD.

Funny detail: a new Eye of the Beholder game is being developed right now for the Nintendo Gameboy.
It will probably be released somewhere around the end of 2002. Of course it will have updated graphics etc, but for the rest (as I understand it) it will be the same game.

Links:

Gamer Grand Central This site has two walkthroughs, three different sets of maps, a character editor and more files for Eye of the Beholder I. Look under the E.

Eye of the Beholder Help Web Here you'll find walkthroughs, maps, character editors, hintfiles and other files about all three Eye of the Beholder games.

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